Hi All,Just to let you know that Virology Down Under is having a rest for a few weeks. I'll be away from my desk for some of that time so posts will be rare or absent.Please keep an eye on on my fellow infectious disease watchers. Each of these sites has its own "personality" and all are worth checking out regularly. You can also follow them via Twitter which is a great way to...
Molecular epidemiology of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV)
And a newcomer to the MERS-CoV birthday celebrations! What great timing to have this released today.The Lancet paper accompanying those recent partial and full genome sequences has been released form its cage. It's a collaborative effort by authors affiliated with the Global Centre for Mass Gatherings Medicine (Ministry of Health Saudi Arabia),...
In a nutshell: Why MERS-CoV data from Saudi Arabia is often limited....
From a Q&A with Dr Ziad Memish, Deputy Health Minister for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia written up by Ellen Knickmeyer of the Wall Street Journal... �I know that there are some newspapers and news agencies requesting more detailed information. As a public-health officer, I feel strongly this is not acceptable. The news media is not the place to detail the critical information about patients...
Happy 1st birthday Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV)
A coronavirus schematic. The spiky bits give the virus its name(corona=crown) and represent the receptor binding, antigenic Spike protein. ...I can remember when you were just a novel little thing.How you have grown young prince and how clever of you to emerge in a Kingdom of all places (corona=crown,...
MERS-CoV detections over the past 6-weeks: 38 cases, 13 deaths.
Click to enlarge.Laboratory confirmed MERS-CoVcases (including deaths; green) and deaths (red) by day (bottom, x-axis), per week. Number of cases on the left hand (y) axis peak at 8/weekUpdating the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) graphs from just over 2-weeks...
3 new MERS-CoV cases, 2 deaths tally at 135
Three new cases were reported from the (Arabic, not English yet) Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) Ministry of Health (MOH) website and details of the entire list can be found on FluTracker's website of confirmed cases. The tally sits at 135 confirmed cases. There may, or may not, be a chunk of other cases ("probables") but they have not been confirmed.Today's cases all had comorbidities and were...
17 new MERS-CoV sequences bind perfectly to frontline screening PCR assay for MERS...
Click to enlarge. The primers/probe are depicted as grey boxes. If mismatches existed they would show up as horizontal black lines within the grey box. No mismatches are evident.The GenBank accession numbers are shown on the left of this alignment of 17 MERS-CoVsequences.Only 17 of the 45 sequences...
MERS-CoV WHO testing guidelines: September update
The World Health Organization has updates its laboratory testing guidelines. They can be accessed here.Some key points:Lower respiratory tract samples are recommended since there are data to support higher viral loads (better detectability using PCR) from these samplesThe upE real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-rtPCR) assay of Corman et al is considered highly sensitive and...
MERS-CoV genomes on GenBank...[UPDATE]
Click to enlarge. A scale schematic of the first MERS-CoV genome, EMC/2012.45 subgenomic (the smallest is 361 nucleotides [nt]) to full length genome (only 13; >30,000nt) sequences of the MERS-CoV have been released onto GenBank ahead of a Lancet Infectious Diseases paper arriving in days....
The Rubik's cube of influenza A genes spins up a new lineage of H7N7
Click to enlarge. A (very) summary view of the latestcontributing influenza viruses that precedes the emergence of human infections with influenza A(H7N9) virusin south-east China in 2013.Lam and a global host of collaborators, writing in Nature on the 21st of August, have identified a previously...
Age and sex morbidity and mortality from avian influenza A(H7N9) virus
Click to enlarge. The majority of cases of H7N9 that occurred worldwide earlier in 2013. Taken from Virology Down Under's H7N9 page.In a study co-written by yours truly using a lot of data collected for Virology Down Under, Dr Joseph Dudley and I have just described, in the Journal of Clinical Virology,...
